


sound of surviving

by KillerGirlFuria



Series: Random Fandom Word Vomit [7]
Category: Sweet Home (Manhwa), 스위트홈 | Sweet Home (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Apocalypse, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Families of Choice, Fix-It, Gen, Hearing Voices, Horror, Monster Apocalypse-Induced Panic Attacks, Monster Girl, Monsters, OC is an aware monster, Panic Attacks, fucking try her, more tags to come, no beta we die like idiots with no self-control, she's utterly out of fucks at this point
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-23 23:14:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30063033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KillerGirlFuria/pseuds/KillerGirlFuria
Summary: This is my farewell to fearThis is my whole heart deciding[...] I’m still hereAnd I’m not done fightingThis is the sound of survivingShe’s been there, past the point of no return.And then she decided that she didn’t want that anymore, because no matter how beautiful it is, and how terrible reality in comparison, in the end a lie like that will always, without fail, hold no worth at all.Or: A girl becomes a monster and then doesn’t, and things change for it.
Relationships: None for now
Series: Random Fandom Word Vomit [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1636369
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the fish always die (but we're getting better)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29957172) by [theheartofthekoko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theheartofthekoko/pseuds/theheartofthekoko). 



> Hello and welcome to I lost my control for 'I lost count which-th time'. This time my obsession of Choice is Sweet Home.
> 
> A foreword: as someone who has read the webtoon before watching the TV series, I will be cherry-picking between both versions as to what I’ll use from them. There are some things I like in both series, and there are things I like significantly less.  
> Among other things, I will be keeping the character Seo Yi-kyung, but I have elected to ignore the government/army bullshit from the show. You can’t convince me that that place wasn’t one of the prime monster breeding grounds, and there’s no way in hell I’ll believe they still have the degree of organization they display in the show, less than a month after the outbreak.  
> And other things. Assuming I'll go that far with my writing.
> 
> The song referenced: Nichole Nordeman - Sound Of Surviving
> 
> **WARNING: the story has NOT been proofread.**

She comes to with a gasp, and there’s ringing in her ears and the confusion befuddling her mind makes it impossible to make out anything that makes sense. She’s confused for a longer while as to why she even came to, because she doesn’t remember losing consciousness prior, she wasn’t even dizzy—she was just here, minding her own business, making dinner, and—

The alarm on the stove shrieks, so loud that she winces, louder than she remembers it ever being, and she rushes to turn it off along with the flame so that the tofu in her kimchi-jjigae doesn’t fall apart, and—

Why is her hand clawed? Or covered with dark scales for that matter?

Why is she taller than her fridge?

Why did she almost slip on a pool of blood?

She looks down at herself, at her feet, equally as clawed and standing in a pool of blood she can now feel on her chin and in her mouth. She’s been having nosebleeds for the past week, though, so that doesn’t concern her as it probably should—she’s been rather stressed lately, after all. Instead, she rushes to the bathroom, wrenching the door open and ripping the doorknob in the process and flicking the light on and then immediately off as it blazes at her eyes harder than it should.

She can see just fine in the darkness of her bathroom, despite walking in from the relatively bright living room, she realizes. It’s odd, the bathroom without the lightbulb on was always unsettlingly dark in her apartment.

She moves to the sink, looks in the mirror, and takes a second to process what she sees.

Then, as if burned, she yelps and throws herself backwards, hitting the tiled wall with her back hard enough to shatter the ceramic.

The monster in the mirror is looking just as terrified as she feels, its glowing eyes wide, and its segmented jaw somewhat open, lower face and shirt stained red with blood. Its chest rises and falls quickly with shallow, panicked breathes.

The realization hits her all of three seconds later, with all the finesse of a bus speeding on a highway.

There’s no monster in the mirror. There’s never been any monster in the mirror.

What is looking back is nothing more but her own reflection.

Yoo Ae-cha almost chokes on the blood that starts to suddenly pump out of her nose as the haze clears and everything that has led her to this point rushes right back to the very forefront of her mind, and then suddenly she’s floating in nothingness and someone screams so loud that Ae-cha can only whimper, covering her ears.

That does nothing, and she’s suddenly yanked to a place where nothing makes sense, and a washed-out, pale, eyeless creature wearing her face falls onto its knees and wails.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” the creature shrieks, clawing at the floor before it, as its empty eye-sockets fill with bloody tears. “AE-CHA WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!”

Confusion morphs into understanding as Ae-cha recalls the past several minutes, and that understanding soon morphs into anger that she can only barely hold in. The eyeless creature keeps wailing, loud enough to make Ae-cha wince thanks to her newly-sensitive hearing, and so she decides—fuck it.

So Ae-cha clenches her clawed hand into a fist, rears back, and punches the eyeless creature square in the nose, and then pounces straight at it, sitting on its chest and clenching her hand on its pale, half-translucent neck.

“What do you mean what have I done?!” Ae-cha snarls with nothing but fury, and her voice doesn’t sound human. The pale thing gasps, shocked at the blatant display of force, and—yeah, that definitely wasn’t possible before. It tries to pry Ae-cha’s hands off its neck, and where it should have easily succeeded, it finds that it cannot make her budge. “What have YOU done?!”

The surprise on its face quickly morphs to confusion, then shock, then fear. For something looking so much like a bleached corpse, it’s quite expressive.

“You fucker,” Ae-cha snarls. “You fucking fucker—you thought, I—You thought you could just what? Trap me there? In my own fucking mind? That I would ever be satisfied living a lie?!”

“You would’ve been happy there,” the creature chokes out. “You should’ve been happy there—how?! How did you-!?”

“Silence, vermin,” Ae-cha snarls at the thing, this creature that’s been an annoying temptress in her head for the past week, constantly gaslighting and manipulating her, making her feel like less than she was. She remembers the helplessness and fury it made her feel.

She remembers giving up, with the mounting stress and everything else that led her to this point. She remembers the creature taking full advantage of her at one of the lowest points in her life. She remembers waking up in a world where everything worked out.

She remembers the overwhelming sense of _Wrong_ , and then the mad dash for the disappearing door amidst the alarmed cries of people she knows for a fact would never give a flying fuck for her.

 _This isn’t real_ , she remembers thinking, sprinting through the extending corridor, _this cannot be real_.

She remembers wrenching the heavy door open with surprisingly little resistance.

Nothingness. Light. And odd sense of exhilarating victory that came out of nowhere.

And then, the scream of the alarm on her stovetop.

(Oh right, the kimchi-jjigae she’s been making.)

“How is this possible?” the creature wails and thrashes despite the pressure on its larynx. “This shouldn’t be possible! You can’t just return from the Happy World! You can’t! You cheated! WHAT DID YOU DO?!”

For something that was so cocky and confided just fifteen minutes ago, it sure sounds and looks pathetic right now, and that brings Ae-cha a sense of vindictive joy. This voice she’s been hearing since a week ago, since the nosebleeds started, that voice which denied her peace of mind and a good night’s sleep, which was hell-bent on manipulating her sense of self now laid crumpled and wailing and at her mercy.

“Aren’t you supposed to know what I know? To feel what I feel?” Ae-cha asks with a grin that she knows can’t look natural. She feels her newly-segmented jaw move in a way that it never could before. “Don’t you already know why I came back?”

“You’ll regret this,” the creature snarls, kicking and clawing at her newly-reshaped body, but Ae-cha figures that there’s much more scales on her than just her hands and feet, so the trashing of the creature that could previously throw her around like a ragdoll is now entirely harmless.

“I’d regret living a lie more.”

The creature snorts, its face morphing into a disturbingly deranged look. “You will regret this. When the world’s gone to shit and everyone’s a monster, and you’re the only one left, you wILL REGRET IT!”

“Everyone’s—What?!”

The creature doesn’t answer, it just laughs hysterically as Ae-cha is yanked back onto the bloodied floor of her bathroom. She looks around, confused, wondering why the laughter sounded so desperate. Her head hurts.

She cleans up the blood, trashes the stained clothes and rummages through her closet for something that would fit her significantly-taller-than-before form, before settling on her favourite oversized cashmere sweater. It’s much less oversized now, but still comfortable enough to wear. She pours herself a bowl full of kimchi-jjigae, and after fiddling with chopsticks for a while, grabs a fork with her newly-clawed hands.

With that, she sits on the windowsill with the soup on her lap and looks through the window.

Something blows up in the distance as Ae-cha absent-mindedly shovels the soup into her mouth, with the bowl right under her face. Eating proves difficult with her newfound jaw, but she doesn’t give up, because that recipe is delicious.

She sets the empty bowl into the sink, washes her face, and returns to the windowsill. She sits on it and opens her window wide, taking in the crisp autumn air. Then, she takes a deep breath and, and the top of her lung, screeches: “WHAT IN THE NAME OF ACTUAL FUCK IS GOING ON?!”

The phone on the stand next to her beeps, its battery now full.

It’s 18:07, October 3rd, 20XX.

Ae-cha eats one more bowl of soup, drinks a beer while scrolling though the newly-popular tags with morbid curiosity, and has two mental breakdowns in-between as she takes in the sparse but slowly incoming information.

It would appear the world is ending.

She’s not surprised in all honesty, but it doesn’t stop her from hating it.

* * *

The implications of October 3rd dawn on Ae-cha when she wakes up the next morning, her alarm beeping at seven in the morning, louder than she’s ever heard it before. She turns it off immediately and sluggishly crawls out of the bed, leaving the safety of her blanket nest in favour of the horrors of today, and the first thing she does is trip on her newly too-long legs and take a face-dive into her nice new carpet. At least it’s soft enough to somewhat cushion her fall. That, or her new body gives her a newfound immunity to personal encounters with the floor.

She might have several of those before she gets her shit together. Her legs seem strong, but walking on her toes when she always walked on her soles might prove to be a challenge.

“You’re getting used to it awfully fast,” the creature’s voice rings in her head, and Ae-cha grimaces. She had her first good night’s sleep in a week without the asshole’s interference. She wasn’t about to let it further ruin her already-shitty day. “What now, Ae-cha? Are you just going to go out like that?”

Ae-cha blinks up at her ceiling and sighs. It wasn’t probably the smartest—

Wait.

“Isn’t there an apocalypse going on?” she asks nobody in particular, and the creature in her head cackles with glee. Ae-cha mentally punches it and it recoils and shuts up, as she bolts up and towards her door, pushing it open frantically and stepping out into the corridor—

Only to come face-to-face with a maw full of teeth.

Ae-cha freezes as something vaguely resembling her next-door neighbour spliced with The Thing and a mop snaps its head towards her, twitching uncontrollably. It looks at her, for several brief seconds and then turns away as if it didn’t almost give Ae-cha a heart attack.

“H-hello?” Ae-cha asks quietly, and the thing snaps its head back in her direction, sniffs the air a bit, and then turns away again in disinterest.

“ ** _ALONE_** ,” the creature croaks in that unnatural sort of voice Ae-cha’s own vocal cords seemed intent on generating since yesterday. “ ** _HE LEFT ME ALONE_**.”

Ae-cha takes a step back. Then another. Then—

Her neighbour’s head snaps towards her again and Ae-cha freezes like a deer in headlights.

“ ** _YOU TOO?_** ” the monster asks, and Ae-cha can feel a full-body twitch shake her in response. “ ** _YOU LEAVE TOO?_** ”

“I have to, um, I have to go.”

That’s the wrong answer, apparently, because the monster-that-looks-like-her-neighbour throws itself at Ae-cha with a shriek, and Ae-cha yelps in panic, grabbing blindly at the monster. It thrashes in her gold, attempting to claw and bite, but—it’s surprisingly easy to just hold it half a meter off the ground.

Until it opens its maw and the tentacles come out, of course.

Ae-cha yelps again, this time in disgust, and slams the monster-that-looks-like-her-neighbour into the floor, shoving her fist into its mouth and ripping the tentacles out in a split-second decision. The monster convulses as she shoves her knee into its solar plexus, and she throws the rapidly-dissolving tentacles away with disgust.

Only for the monster to start regrowing them before Ae-cha’s very eyes.

“There’s no coming back for you, is there,” Ae-cha asks and doesn’t get the answer. She doesn’t expect one anyway.

“It’s your kin now,” the creature inside her head chuckles. Ae-cha grimaces. “You’re one of them!”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hak. Or, at least, I think you used to be Mrs. Hak,” she says as she grabs the monsters head, pressing onto its chest harder with her knee to get a good grip, and pulls. She watches in morbid fascination as its head comes off much too easily and immediately starts rotting in her hands.

She chokes and throws it away with a splat, but the body under her knee keeps thrashing, strong enough to push Ae-cha off. She falls on her back, her head smacking onto the linoleum of her flat’s entrance, and the now-headless corpse throws itself on top of her, clawing wildly. Keeping it at bay proves easy enough, but the moment Ae-cha throws it away, it just pounces right back up at her, and she doubts making too much noise is a good idea right about now.

As she’s holding the creature at an arm’s length, she spots her taser. She grabs it without further consideration, charges it up, and rams it into the creature’s neck.

She feels the current through all the blood, and it’s far from a pleasant feeling, but she keeps at it as the headless creature convulses wildly and starts smoking. She stops when the taser gives out and the creature falls onto its back, convulsing in what Ae-cha genuinely hopes are death throes.

She looks around, trying to see if that’s all there was on the hallway, or if anything else didn’t come, lured in with the sound of the scuffle.

Nothing. Thank all fuck, she supposes.

She looks around, spotting a contact and a cable, and thinks—why not?

She frays the cable with her new claws, shows the exposed wires into the creature’s gaping neck, valiantly ignoring that it begins to move again, and shoves the plug into the contact, instantly sending however-high-voltage-there-was-in-there into the creature.

She stops only when it begins decaying in the same way as its removed head, pulling the cable out of the contact.

With that morbid duty done and the now-decaying corpse of the monster-that-looked-like-her-neighbour little more than a pile of rot in the hallway, Ae-cha returns to her apartment, fixes the 910 plaque on her door a bit, and softly closes the door behind her.

She takes all of two steps before the taser slips out of her fingers and she collapses to her knees, chanting ‘what the fuck’ while hyperventilating.


	2. chapter one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Still not proofread. Proceed with caution.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ae-cha saves a person, flips an old man off, and the protein monster makes a cameo. Other things happen in-between.
> 
> Also there's an art I arted at the bottom.

There’s a commotion outside of the apartment. It sounds like children, so Ae-cha feels compelled to look out and check, if only because of literal years of training necessary for her line of work. She throws the curtains open and slides the glass panels to the side, cautiously peeking out—

An eyeball thing soars past her, a man screams, and suddenly Ae-cha reaches out, impossibly further than she thinks she should, newly-elongated fingers wrapping around the falling man’s leg and midsection and pulling him forward, so that he comes barrelling right into her rather than splattering into the ground nine floors down. Ae-cha grunts, staggering slightly under a weight of a fully-grown man at high velocity, and takes a step back. The children outside scream and the man goes rigid against her chest as Ae-cha’s fingers return to their now-normal length. Ae-cha blinks down at the man, and then hears the children scream again. She moves away from the man and back to the window, looking through it only to see a neck, stretched impossibly long and way higher than her floor.

The man makes a choked sound, moving sluggishly towards the window, tears streaming down his face.

“Su-yeoung! Yeong-su!” he cries out and Ae-cha growls, reaching out to claw at the monster’s neck, just as a monitor of all things plummets down, hitting it and grazing her arm. She hisses, retracting her hand and retreating back into her flat as the monster’s neck moves farther away and beyond her reach, as if absent-mindedly avoiding her as just another obstacle. The monster seems much more interested in the boy yelling at it at the top of his lungs than the children, at least.

Though it’s not like that’s much better.

Ae-cha grits her teeth. There’s no way she can reach the monster now, not without her fingers elongating again and she has no clue how she did that, or how to repeat it, or without jumping, and like hell she’s doing _that_. She jumps back from the window, looking around frantically. The man yelps, scurrying as far from her as he can, but she pays him no mind, her eyes landing on the broom instead. She grabs it, snapping the brush off and dragging the pole back to the window. With enough reach she takes some momentum, and whacks the elongated neck as hard as she can, which right now, apparently, is quite hard. Concrete shoots out in every direction, the broom pole breaks in her hands, and the neck creature makes a sound that is obviously pained. However, with its head up in someone’s room, it doesn’t otherwise react. She lost her tool, and it had no effect.

Then a shot whirls past, hitting the exact spot she hit, splitting the neck in two. The part on the ground falls down limply. Ae-cha turns to look up, from one side to the other. There, several floors above her, an old man with a makeshift gun is looking down at her oddly, like she’s some animal in a ZOO.

Ae-cha narrows her eyes and flips him off, and he snorts, shaking his head in disbelief.

She returns back into her flat and sighs with relief, only to instinctively bring her hand up as a knife goes down on her neck. She grips the blade as it painfully and uncomfortably cuts into the inside of her hand, but without much issue, as eyes of the man she saved go comically wide. He gasps, letting go of the knife, and falls on his ass, crawling back quickly as Ae-cha raises to her full height.

“That’s an awfully rude way to treat your saviour, you know?” she says, raising an eyebrow, and he freezes. He resembles a fish, now, with his eyes impossibly wide and mouth opening and closing without making a sound.

“You—you can speak?” he eventually manages to ask.

“No, I’m fucking pantomiming,” Ae-cha scoffs, her fucks to give gone with the wind and she herself emotionally drained after several consecutive emotional breakdowns from yesterday, moving past him despite a startled yelp. She dumps the bloodied knife in the sink and turns the water on, cleaning her wound. It stings like a bitch and a half, and it’ll be problematic for a while no doubt, but it was better than getting stabbed in the neck, she supposes. She needs to get some gauze, and—

She freezes, looking on with morbid fascination as the wounds on her hand stop bleeding, then let out a hiss of steam and close rapidly right before her very eyes.

“Huh,” she says, bringing her hand up and into the light. It’s completely unmarred now, as if there was no wound there to begin with. Ae-cha freezes, realizing the implications of it, and jumps back towards the window, ignoring the man’s startled yelp. Down below, on the sidewalk, the now-headless body of the former eyeball monster is limping away from the scene.

There goes that problem, casually walking away.

“Who are you?” the man asks shakily, with his hand, as shaky as his voice, dangerously close to Ae-cha’s collection of kitchen knives.

“Yoo Ae-cha, your saviour,” she introduces herself with a flippant wave, entirely too out of fucks for a polite introduction. “Why were you trying to leave the apartment?”

The man freezes, looks at her, then at the window, and then it’s his turn to bolt towards it so fast that Ae-cha, in fear of him falling out again, gabs him by his shirt.

“Su-yeong?! Yeong-su?!” the man calls up, and Ae-cha winces. She grabs him by the collar.

“Are you out of your mind?!” she says frantically. “Do you want to call more of them here?”

The man instantly pales and gulps, nervously looking around. They’re in the clear for now.

“Dad?!” a tiny voice yells back, but the man, now knowing better, shakes his hand and makes the universal ‘shhh’ motion. It seems to work, because he dips back into Ae-cha’s apartment, looking for something. Ae-cha just wordlessly hands him a big notebook and a black marker.

He quickly scribbles what he needs to say, and after some more gesticulating back and forth, he gets off the windowsill and places the notebook on a stand.

“I, thank you for saving me, and, uh, I’m sorry for—”

“Don’t mention it,” Ae-cha waves her hand. “If you see any other monster it’d probably be saver to stab them without questions anyway.”

“I’m Kim Kang-dae,” the man bows. “Thank you. Uh.”

“I think I scratched you,” Ae-cha says, noting that his shirt and pant left aren’t exactly untouched where her fingers wrapped around. She does have claws now, after all.

“That’s not important. I—I need to go, my kids—”

“Hey!” Ae-cha grabs his arm above the elbow, effectively rooting him in place. “Wait the fuck up—"

“I—I need to go!” Kang-dae says, increasingly frantic, but Ae-cha doesn’t budge. She shakes him a bit for good measure.

“First of all, you’re bleeding. Second of all, we’re three floors below them, and the hallways can very well be crawling with monsters, and I doubt many will be as friendly as me,” she tells him calmly. “So, if you want to go out there and die on the staircase, by my guest. But if you want to survive and get back to your kids, sit the fuck down and wait. Hmm?”

He looks at her. She looks back, unblinking.

He sits the fuck down.

Ae-cha retrieves her medical kit from the bathroom.

“Why were you leaving?” she asks, and she gives him the bag. It as disinfectant and gauze mostly, but it should be enough to patch up shallow cuts.

Kang-dae hoists his shirt up and Ae-cha forces herself to not oogle his well-toned stomach because that’d be rude. With the quick glance, she still notices the cuts, though; shallow, bleeding sluggishly, and otherwise harmless, won’t even leave a mark, but there.

“To get food. My kids, they visited unannounced, and I didn’t have much,” Kang-dae answers as he puts disinfectant on some gauze and starts dabbing it on the cuts.

Ae-cha looks at her hands, idly wondering just how easy would it be to actually kill a person in her current state, and then clenches her hands and sighs. “Fair enough.”

She shakes her head, and moves to look around her apartment, taking stock. It’s October 5th now, and she went for her usual big grocery shopping four days ago, just before shit hit the fan. She was always a homebody with a habit of stocking up for weeks at a time so that she wouldn’t have to go out more than absolutely necessary, so she still had a lot of untouched food. In fact, with the constant nosebleeds and voice in her head, she bought more than usual just in case it would be necessary. In a way, she was right, she just went out of commission in a completely different way than she expected.

Besides, it was about damn time she moved her ass. There was an apocalypse outside, for crying out loud, and she had superpowers wrong. As much as she disliked doing other things than her job and her hobbies, it didn’t feel right to just sit on her ass and pickle in beer and mental breakdowns. She was currently jobless and there was the end of the world going around, so indulging in her hobbies with her usual abandon wouldn’t cut it.

She slaps her cheeks twice, and turns to Kang-dae.

“When you’re done, take out everything that’s in the fridge and put it on the counters. If there’s any cutlery, just shove it in the sink,” she orders, as she herself dives for the closet. She thinks she has several travel bags at the bottom, and they’re about to come in handy.

She packs some clothes she thinks she can still fit into, her phone with the charger, her switch (kids plus apocalypse isn’t a good mix, but Animal Crossing will hopefully make it a bit better), and all the things she thinks may come in handy. There’s duct tape, knives, and her two tasers and pepper spray. She gives the tasers to Kang-dae.

He looks at her questioningly.

“I fried my neighbour with a broken cable,” she says in lieu of explanation. “A taser should be enough to temporarily stop a monster should you run into one. Though… I should probably advise you to not run into anything at all. I accidentally ripped off the doorknob off my door and didn’t notice until later.”

They spend next several minutes in a rather awkward silence. Kang-dae patches up his midsection, moves to his leg, then packs the med-kit and moves to the fridge. Ae-cha has always been meticulous with her food, because she’s never had much and always had to deal with it on her own, so everything is pre-packed, labelled, and things are eaten in order.

“There’s meat in the freezer,” Ae-cha says, pointing at the lower compartments of the fridge. “It’s all frozen solid and it’ll likely take several hours to thaw, but I have no idea if we’ll have anything to keep it in.”

“How much?” Kang-dae asks. “I have one of those picnic coolers at my place, maybe it’ll fit.”

“Check and see? How would I know how big your cooler is?”

“Ah. Fair.”

Ae-cha considers her laptop’s usefulness versus its size and weight. Internet went out, but she has some games there.

She sets it to the side. She’ll take it if she has space left.

It takes them a while to pack whatever Ae-cha deems useful, but the silence grows more comfortable by the minute. Kang-dae stops fidgeting, though he still flinches if Ae-cha moves too close, too fast.

He doesn’t ask questions, even though he obviously wants to, focusing on packing. He glances up at the ceiling ever so often, and Ae-cha can understand his urgency.

Eventually, three of Ae-cha’s travel bags are filled to the brim, and the third only has a bit in it, so she shoves a blanket, two pillows, and her Pusheen plush into it. She then gives the lightest bag to Kang-dae and hoists the other two up with ease, and marches towards the door.

She peers out into the hallway cautiously, straining her newly-enhanced senses, but picks up on no movement. On one hand, she should find it odd, but quite a few people from the ninth floor would often go out. If there were any survivors or monsters, they were currently keeping quiet.

There was the vaguely-human-shaped mound of decomposing flesh that was Ae-cha’s monsterfied neighbour, and then there were two further corpses Ae-cha didn’t pick up on earlier, both laying face-down in red puddles of their own blood.

“That’s—” Kang-dae looks at the decomposing mound with trepidation.

“That’s the neighbour I electrocuted,” Ae-cha explains. “Ripped its head off and rammed a broken cable in the neck hole, and then just waited. High enough voltage kills monsters, apparently.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, it’s clear for now—let’s go before something worse comes.”

As if to prove Ae-cha’s point, the walls rumble and something growls ‘protein’ from the floor below. Neither of them waits to find out what it is as they hurry upstairs.

* * *

Bonus: badly drawn Ae-cha portrait, by me.

I've attempted something more realistic-seeming than my usual full animu arts.

I might bother to draw her full body eventually.


End file.
